Half Man, Half Statue? | BBC Timestamp

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]And up in the hills of Knos, there's a disused quarry where you can find one of those giant figures which never made it off the island.

[00:00:15]Now, I've read lots about this, but I've never actually seen it.

[00:00:23]What it is is a vast marble statue half finished still in his quarry.

[00:00:37]This half man half mountain was huned out perhaps as early as 700 BC.

[00:00:47]As you can see, he was going to be one of those massive static early Greek sculptures.

[00:00:57]Here are his feet.

[00:01:00]And I'm now walking up past his legs.

[00:01:05]Uh, this thing here, this must be his outstretched arm.

[00:01:14]And then right up here, we come to his head. And by the looks of it, he was going to have a beard and they've already roughed out the shape.

[00:01:29]Makes me think that some men can be very stubborn, but this guy hasn't budged 2 and a half thousand years.

[00:01:40]Quite why he's still here is a mystery.

[00:01:44]Something must have gone wrong. But whatever. This figure gives us a great view of how the Greek sculptors went about their work. They must have cut a trench out all the way around it in order to get to it to work. And you can see a rather neatly worked trench at the back.

[00:02:05]For me, it's just a wonderful illustration of the number of people that must have been involved in making a statue like this. And every one of these little pup marks has been made by somebody's tool with hundreds of men hacking away to get this statue like this.

[00:02:31]I find it bit weirdly surreal, but his feet make it extremely nice place to sit.

[00:02:43]Forever lying here in repose is a remnant of a style that the Greeks were soon to leave behind.

[00:02:53]Because shortly after he'd been abandoned, Greek sculptors developed an astonishing new style that was distinctly their own.

[00:03:07]There's a fundamental and universal paradox at the heart of the sculptor's art.

[00:03:15]The lived human body, its mobility, its warmth, its changing character has to be fixed, suspended in the cold and lifeless mass that is stone.

[00:03:32]It's always an artificial compromise.

[00:03:39]But the beginnings of the fifth century BC sees Greek sculpture spring almost to life.

[00:03:48]The rigid figures of the past give way to daring experiments in form, nuance and subtlety, movement and musculature.

[00:04:05]In under 200 years, Greek sculptors seem to have developed the tricks and techniques to weave the illusion of a living human body.

[00:04:16]So radical was the change that it has been called the Greek Revolution.

[00:04:26]The exact cause of this revolution is one of the great mysteries of the history of art.

[00:04:33]Some believe it was Greek democracy and its new respect for the individual that launched it.

[00:04:40]Others that Greek artists just got better.

[00:04:44]In truth, we don't know.

[00:04:48]But whatever the causes, over the next centuries, it was to have some truly astonishing artistic consequences.